64’ – Seba fouled right in front of the Tigres goal. Seba fires it high into the leaping wall.

70’ – OMG… Bradley loops a magical ball right onto the path of Altidore, but his first touch gets away from him as he was right there… Damn so close.

72’ – Nilo hacks down Seba to get a booking.

79’ – Bradley free kick finds Moor, who’s downward header is too sharp, and the keeper is able to get in front of it.

80’ – SUB – Vazquez to come in for Delgado

80’ – SUB – Auro in for van der Weil

84’ – Ricketts in for Altidore… Or is it… Nope, Hagglund is getting the call.

85’ – Zavaleta off for Hagglund.

89’ – GOAL – FUCKING GET IN THERE SON! OSORIO ON THE END OF SOME INCREDIBLE RESILIENCE FROM THE REST OF HIS TEAMMATES. THE BALL DID A LAP AROUND THE TIGRES DEFENSE, ENDING UP AT OSO’S FOOT AND HE BACK HEELED IT IN!ROBINS 2, TEE-GRAYS 1

90+3’ – Mavinga gets on his horse to make a great tackle to swipe a near goal chance.

Full Time : Toronto 2, UANL Tigres 1

Man of the Match : So many good performances, but Oso, take a bow.Goat of the Game : some of the Tigres playersRef Rating : 4 out of 5I Am Not The Gaffer, But… : when does the kickstarter happen to build the statue?!?!In Case You PVR’d It : First half had a few moments, but the second half was spectacular.

Bold Predictions Results :

Failed it. No goals for the Frenchman

Failed it. They not only didn’t lose, they won.

Failed it. Quite the opposite.

I still feel justified in being scared. Tigres looked very good.

However, Toronto weren’t intimidated at all. They played cautious, but not to the point of being passive. They came out with creativity, aggression, they played for one another and they didn’t give up. How can you not like this side?

So, some of you nerds out there are probably aware of the site footballdatabase.com. There they have a world ranking of clubs in the 40 most popular leagues. I don’t particularly care about the top 50 clubs, because through geography, opportunity and finances, they don’t apply to my sense of reality.

However, this chart does. I’m not about to question the integrity of the statistics, how the numbers are skewed to favour one club/league over another. That’s not the point so much as that someone has taken the time to come up with a formula for ranking all of the clubs.

A few years ago, Toronto beat Cruz Azul. Toronto beat one of the 500 best clubs (I think they were 419 or something at the time) in the world. That crappy side (most of them were, and the degrees of craptitude varied from season to season), took down a top 500 club. Just once. That’s all I needed was once.

Also, Toronto is in the top 500. Ahead of Brazil Serie B side Goias, but behind Brazil Serie C side Cuiaba. It doesn’t make sense in that microscopic sense (technically they’re all tied), but you get it. This is validation.

Mark is a full-time graphic designer, full-time smart ass and full-time logo, stadium and kit nerd. When he isn't writing ridiculous match reports or redesigning logos for his own amusement, he's salivating over the day that promotion and relegation occurs in MLS. You can follow him @kitnerdmark on the twitterz.

5 Comments

Mark HSV

March 8, 2018

It’s very interesting to see that North American club ranking. I had no idea that Tigres were at the top.

It was a pretty stressful match to watch, but TFC really got comfortable playing their attacking game. When Tigres went up 1-0 though I thought TFC were done. I figured the only chance was to keep the game scoreless and hope to bag a goal, but wow once again they stepped it up and won the game. I hope they can score an early away goal in Mexico next week to negate the possible advantage Tigres could have.

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